The development of quasi-markets
in secondary education
1. 2 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
Purpose
This paper traces the development of a quasi-market in secondary education. It catalogues reforms since the
1980s which have either moved towards or away from a quasi-market and uses a framework adapted from a
paper by Allen and Burgess1 to assess how closely the current system resembles a fully-formed quasi-market.
This paper does not seek to assess whether quasi-markets are a superior or inferior method for delivering
education.
Background
The term quasi-market was originally used by Professor Julian Le Grand to describe a series of public service
reforms introduced in the late 1980s. The reforms were market-like because they introduced a split between the
purchaser and providers of public services, and because they introduced competition between providers. Le Grand
added the prefix ‘quasi’ however, to emphasise some important differences with conventional markets. In quasimarkets:



providers are not necessarily profit-maximising firms (they may be state-owned or charitable
organisations)
choice may be exercised on behalf of the user
users ‘spending power’ is determined by the value of a voucher or earmarked budget, rather than their
wealth.
There are generally two types of argument to justify the use of quasi-markets in education. The first, and most
common, is that introducing competition means schools must vigorously compete for students and the funding that
follows them by maximising outcomes for students. Without competition, the argument runs, monopolistic state
providers can afford to rest on their laurels and allow productivity to fall. As Adam Smith observed in the Wealth of
Nations “Monopoly… is a great enemy to good management.”2
The second type of justification for quasi-markets is based on evolutionary economics3. In the terminology of
evolutionary economics, schools are given the freedom to generate different approaches to educating pupils,
parents then select an approach based on the results of different schools, and superior approaches are then
amplified as popular schools expand and, conversely, unpopular schools shrink. Over time, the average quality of
education should steadily rise. This justification emphasises the importance of innovation rather than effort, and
focuses on new approaches rather than applying maximising returns from the existing approach. It should be
noted however, that the two justifications are not mutually exclusive and can both be operating at the same time.
In a paper written for the 2020 Public Services Trust Dr Becky Allen and Professor Simon Burgess lay out four
conditions which are necessary for ensuring that a system of school choice, or quasi-market, will improve
educational outcomes.
1 Allen, R, and Burgess, S, 2010, ‘The Future of Competition and Accountability in Education’, 2020 Public Services Trust,
available at: http://clients.squareeye.net/uploads/2020/documents/ESRC_Allan%20and%20Burgess_FINAL.pdf
2
3
Smith, A, 1776, ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations’
Plamping, Gordon, Pratt, 2009, ‘Innovation and Public Services: Insights from Evolution’, available at:
http://www.cihm.leeds.ac.uk/new/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/6227_CIHM_public_services_brochure_WEB2.pdf 3 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
1. Parents must value and be able to correctly identify educational success as a school characteristic.
2. Parental choice must be meaningful and capable of affecting the allocation of pupils to schools.
3. Schools must find it beneficial to be popular and to grow.
4. The best way for schools to be popular must be to raise the quality of teaching and learning, rather than
engage in other activities.
Implicit in the fourth condition is the assumption that schools have some degree of control over the way education
is delivered. This is closely related to the broader idea, outlined above, that the system must be able to generate
new approaches to delivering education. In order to emphasise this point we can add a fifth condition:
5. There must be some way of creating new approaches to educating children
This can either be achieved by allowing variation to occur endogenously within the system (an example would be
allowing schools to vary the length of the school day) or by generating it exogenously outside the system (an
example might be the Department of Education introducing a new type of school).
With these conditions in mind we can now trace the development of education reforms and assess the extent to
which it fulfils these five conditions.
History
The development of quasi-markets in the UK has been a slow process which has progressed in fits and starts. It
can be loosely grouped into four stages, each of which seems to have followed different logics of reform:




1980-1996: Birth of the quasi-market
1997-2002: The cooperative turn
2002-2007: Spreading competition
2008-present: Competition and cooperation?
The next four sections of this paper outline the development of the quasi-market by cataloguing the specific
reforms which have occurred during each of these periods. It should be noted that this is not intended to be a
comprehensive history of education reform, only a history of the reforms that have had an effect on the quasimarket over the period.
1980-1996: Birth of the quasi-market
Efforts to establish a quasi-market in secondary education can be traced back to the Conservative governments of
the 1980s and Secretary of State for Education, Mark Carlisle’s Education Act of 1980. The act introduced the
‘assisted places’ scheme, which provided money for academically gifted children to attend private schools. It also
introduced ‘open enrolment’, which allowed parents across the country to choose which school their child attended
as long as the particular school was not oversubscribed, in which case the local authority would allocate them to a
school. A minority of parents were thus given the choice between local state schools and private schools, while the
rest were given, at least in theory, a greater choice between local state schools. The act also obliged state schools
to publish their examination results giving parents more information on the quality of different schools. This
information was of limited use however, as it did not account for different school intakes or provide metrics of
student progress.
4 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
There was then a pause in quasi-market type reforms during Keith Joseph’s period as Secretary of State for
Education. Joseph’s reforms focused instead on cutting the costs of managing the education system and shifting
control over education spending from local education authorities to central government.
In 1986 Joseph was replaced by Kenneth Baker. At the Conservative party conference of that same year, Baker
announced his intentions to open a chain of ‘city technology colleges’. These were science-focused inner-city
schools which were owned and governed by autonomous governing bodies rather than local authorities. The first
school was announced in 1987 and fifteen were built in total. Although this did not in its own right constitute a
significant increase in the autonomy of the school system it did pave the way for further reforms which steadily
reduced the influence of local education authorities over schools.4
In 1988 the Education Reform Act gave parents the power to appeal against local authority decisions to allocate
their child to a school which was not their first preference. On the supply side, the act gave state schools the
chance to hold a parental vote to opt out of local authority control. One in six secondary schools chose to do so,
representing a significant increase in school autonomy. Because these new ‘grant-maintained’ schools acted as
their own admission authority however, this led to schools admitting more affluent pupils, a practice known as
‘cream skimming’.5 Alongside the creation of ‘grant-maintained’ schools, the ‘local management of schools’ policy
allowed schools controlled by local education authorities a modest amount of financial independence.
Funding arrangements were also adjusted to link around 80% of school funding to the number of pupils attending
a school, putting schools in direct competition for resources. The legislation also standardised course content and
examinations through the introduction of the national curriculum and national assessment which improved the
comparability of school results. To summarise, Baker’s reforms had the dual approach of standardising curriculum
content and testing procedures while increasing the diversity of the way in which that curriculum was delivered.
Ken Clarke then built on Kenneth Baker’s work when he took over at the Department of Education in 1990
promising to increase choice and diversity.6 School inspection was centralised in 1992 and the results of Office for
Standards in Education (Ofsted) inspections were also made public, increasing parent’s ability to judge school
quality. League tables were also introduced with the explicit intention of helping parents to systematically compare
schools.
The 1993 Education Act offered schools extra funding to develop specialisms in particular subject areas, further
increasing diversity of provision. Reforms at the tail end of the Major government largely sought to enshrine
previous policy in new quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations (quangos) such as the Funding Agency
for Schools, which took over several of the responsibilities previously fulfilled by local education authorities, such
as checking the financial resilience of, and making payments to, grant-maintained schools.
One radical but little known attempt to extend the quasi-market was introduced in Wales in 1995 by John
Redwood. The ‘popular schools initiative’ provided consistently oversubscribed schools with additional capital
funding explicitly intended to allow them to increase their classroom capacity and ‘market share’. A subsequent
survey of the schools however, suggested they were largely oversubscribed due to local population increases,
4
For a timeline of reforms relating to the roll of local authorities in secondary education see Hill, R. 2011, ‘The Missing Middle:
the Case for School Commissioners, p13-14), the RSA, available at:
http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/630053/RSA-The_Missing_Middle_report_2012.pdf
5
Allen, R, 2008, Choice-Based Secondary School Admissions in England: Social Stratification and the Distribution of Educational
Outcomes, p176, PhD Thesis, available at: http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/632/1/Allen_2008_thesis_with_corrections.pdf
6
See Choice and Diversity: a New Framework for Schools available at
http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/pdfs/1992-choice-and-diversity.pdf 5 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
rather than influxes of students from the surrounding area searching out superior educational provision.7 The
programme was ended before the 1997 election, though it is unclear why.
1997-2002: The cooperative turn
The first white paper of the new Labour Government, Excellence in Schools, signalled a change in emphasis in
education policy by explicitly adopting the principle ‘standards matter more than structures’. The introduction of
‘literacy hour’, a tightly specified and rigorous programme for teaching language skills, embodied this shift in focus
towards content and pedagogy and away from issues of governance and institutional structures.
Where policy did address structures however, there was also a clear change in direction away from competition
towards partnership and cooperation. Education action zones were an early initiative which created partnerships of
schools and other local organisations, including businesses, intended to share best practice and promote peer-topeer learning in the poorest areas. Between 1998 and 2005 good schools were designated as ‘beacon schools’
and given additional funding on the condition that they proactively partnered with neighbouring schools to help
improve their performance. Specialist schools were also reoriented to act as centres of excellence required to
share their subject specific expertise with neighbouring schools. Despite this switch of emphasis however, little
was done to reverse the quasi-market reforms of preceding Conservative governments.
Labour also made early reforms to admissions policy by abolishing grant-maintained schools and obliging all
schools to comply with the centrally determined Admissions Code. This was designed to stop schools using
admissions interviews to covertly select the most able pupils. Running counter to this, however, specialist schools
were actually given the power to select a proportion of students by aptitude for their specialist subject, though in
practice relatively few schools exercised this power.
2002-2007: Spreading competition
The next period of educational reform was characterised by a renewed effort to employ choice and competition to
drive up standards, and an attempt to spread the operation of competition by placing new obligations on all local
authorities and helping poorer students utilise choice. It was also characterised however by the targeted
employment of collaborative networks of schools to try and improve education in specific areas.
Labour was re-elected in 2001 and a year later ‘value added’ measures for all secondary schools were added to
league tables. This allowed parents to see how much progress pupils made at a school rather than just raw
results, which are heavily influenced by pupil intake.
In the August of 2002 Blair wrote a set of papers laying out a clear direction for public service reform. Blair’s
biographer, Anthony Seldon, argues that this was an important moment in the development of Blairism and
articulated for the first time “the agenda he had been groping towards at least since he became party leader eight
years earlier”.8 The key document focused on public service reform and made a commitment “to rebuild the
service around the consumer” with an emphasis on diversity of supply and choice in education and healthcare.
In 2002 the first ‘academy schools’ (independently managed state schools with additional operational autonomy)
opened, replacing their failing predecessor schools. By the summer of 2003 Blair was demanding hundreds more
to be opened and a year later the government formally committed itself to having 200 academies open or in the
pipeline by 2010, securing the policy as the flagship New Labour secondary education reform. Academies were
largely modelled on city technology colleges and represented a renewed effort, still underway in 2012, to remove
local education authorities from the governance of schools.
7
Audit Commission, 1996, Trading Places: the Supply and Allocation of School Places, available at: http://www.auditcommission.gov.uk/SiteCollectionDocuments/AuditCommissionReports/NationalStudies/tradingplacesreview.pdf
8
Seldon, A, Blair, Free Press, p634 6 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
In 2003 the government launched the ‘London Challenge’ which used multiple interventions to try and tackle
longstanding educational underperformance in the capital. Much like ‘Excellence in Cities’, it concentrated on a
specific geographical area and involved the creation of networks or ‘families’ of schools intended to help them
work together for mutual gain. That year also saw the creation of the first ‘leading edge partnerships’, which
identified high-performing schools and gave them additional funding to help them work with nearby schools to
raise standards. The policy was similar to, and eventually superseded, Beacon Schools. The programme was
limited in size however, with just over 200 partnerships created between 2003 and 2006.
In 2005 the Labour government published a white paper called Higher Standards, Better Schools for All: More
Choice for Parents and Pupils. It made the most overt statement yet of the government’s belief in the importance
of choice in driving up standards in schools. Tony Blair even openly described the reforms as being aimed at
establishing what “would in one sense be a market”.9 The white paper contained two demand side policies, later
enacted in the Education and Inspections Act 2006. These were explicitly intended to refine the quasi-market and
make it work for the least advantaged. Free school transport for poorer pupils was extended to cover the three
nearest schools to enable greater choice and choice advisers were created to help poorer parents decide which
school to apply to.
That year also saw several important supply side reforms. Local authorities were, for the first time, put under a
statutory obligation to work with school commissioners to promote diversity and choice among schools. They were
also obliged, by the Education (New Secondary School Proposals) (England) Regulations 2006, to hold an open
contest between potential providers for any entirely new schools which they wished to open. The outcome of such
competitions would then be adjudicated by the local ‘schools organisation committee’, which is independent of the
council.
The ‘successful and popular schools initiative’ was also introduced. This allowed oversubscribed schools to access
capital funding which enabled them to increase the number of pupils they could accommodate, although the local
authority remained in control of the maximum number of pupils any school was allowed to admit. In 2007
additional capital funding for the expansion of successful and popular schools was made available through the
Standards and Development Fund.
After 2006, the government concentrated efforts on systematically replacing low-performing secondary schools
with academies and increasing the proportion of schools with specialist status (reaching 85% of all schools by
2009.) Both policies contributed further to diversity of supply.
2007 - present: Competition and cooperation?
Since 2007 multiple policies designed to promote cooperation among schools have been either introduced or
scaled up. At the same time, the Coalition Government has introduced several measures which have supported
the development of the quasi-market.
In 2008 ‘London Challenge’ was scaled up to include Manchester and the Black Country, and renamed the ‘City
Challenge’. The national leaders of education (NLE) scheme, which identifies high-performing school leaders and
pairs them with weaker local schools, was also scaled up. It was also around this time that the number and size of
academy chains began to increase. Academy chains involve either one academy sponsor running multiple schools
or multiple academies managed by a single overarching body while retaining their own governing bodies.
9
See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4372216.stm
7 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
Source: Hill, R. et al, 2012, The Growth of Academy Chains: Implications for Leaders and Leadership’, National College for
School Leadership
In 2010 the Coalition Government was formed and Michael Gove became Secretary of State for Education. Press
attention on coalition education policy has largely focused on the rapid expansion of the academies programme
but Gove’s reforms have, in line with the other reforms since 2007, also concentrated on the creation and scaling
up of collaborative arrangements to allow local networks of schools to help each other to improve.
The 2010 white paper The Importance of Teaching introduced a raft of measures designed to boost collaboration,
pledging to:




significantly increase the number of local and national leaders of education
introduce the idea of ‘teaching schools’ (designating excellent schools as providers of professional
development and training to neighbouring schools)
publish data about contextually similar ‘families of schools’ within a local area to allow learning from the
best
create a ‘collaborative incentive’ which will financially reward strong schools who demonstrably improving
the performance of nearby schools.
Gove believes these reforms will lead to schools “collaborating on a scale that has never been witnessed
before.”10
Despite this renewed emphasis on school cooperation, Gove seems to remain committed to promoting competition
between schools. In a speech to the 2012 Spectator Conference, for example, he argued that “we need to create
more new schools to generate innovation, raise expectations, give parents choice and drive up standards through
competition”.11 On the demand side, league tables have been redesigned to improve the quality of information
given to parents on school performance. ‘Contextual value added’ has been scrapped and is set to be replaced
with ‘value added’ broken down for different pupil groups. This will show parents how much progress is made by
low, medium and high-ability pupils as well as disadvantaged pupils within a given school.
10
Gove, M., Speech to the Education World Forum, 11 Jan 2011, available at :
http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/speeches/a0072274/michael-gove-to-the-education-world-forum
11
Michael Gove Speech, ‘How are the children? Achievement for all the in 21st Century’, 26th June 2012, available at
http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/speeches/a00210738/govespect
8 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
Reforms on the supply side have been particularly radical. The Coalition has accelerated the conversion of
schools to academy status, allowing successful, as well as failing schools, to convert to academy status. Free
schools (a variant on the academy model allowing parents or teacher groups to start up entirely new autonomous
schools) and studio schools (focusing on practical, project-based learning) have also been introduced, further
increasing diversity of supply. Running counter to this however, specialist schools have been scrapped because
the Coalition Government believes they do not warrant the additional funding. Meanwhile, changes to school
finance have increased the extent to which funding follows pupils and the introduction of the pupil premium has
reduced the incentives for cream skimming (since poorer, and harder to educate pupils, now come with more
funding.) Another little-known reform in 2011 also made a big leap towards a fully formed quasi-market by allowing
academy and voluntary aided schools to expand in size without the permission of the local authority.
Summary
The table in the annex below shows all the reforms which either moved towards (coloured green) or away
(coloured red) from a quasi-market in education over the last 30 years. The reforms are mapped against the five
conditions, adapted from Allen and Burgess, necessary for an education quasi-market to improve outcomes. It is
now possible to assess to what extent the current secondary education system fulfils those criteria.
1. Schools must have autonomy over the drivers of educational outcomes OR there must be a variety
of schools types.
Schools have become slowly more autonomous over the period and this looks set to continue with the
expansion of the academy sector. More than half of all secondary schools are now academies, or in the
process of becoming them.12 Although specialist schools have been abolished, free schools and studio
schools have also been introduced, increasing diversity of supply.
2. Parents must value and be able to correctly identify educational success as a school
characteristic.
Questions remain over how effectively parents can identify which school will be best for their child due to
time delays in school performance data (league tables show the performance children five cohorts ahead
of children about to join a school) and the complications of adjusting for contextual factors13. There are
also questions over how much of a priority parents place on academic attainment in relation to other
factors e.g. proximity.14 15
3. Parental choice must be meaningful and capable of affecting the allocation of pupils to schools
Parents have been able to specify a preference for which school their child attends since the late eighties
and this right was strengthened when parents gained the right to appeal against a local authority
allocation. Meaningful school choice does however remain constrained by how many schools are within
feasible travelling distance from their home and on whether or not those schools are already
12
Richardson, H. ‘Half of England’s Secondary Schools Becoming Academies’, BBC News, 5 April 2012, available at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-17628691
13
Leckie, G, Goldstein, S, The Limitations of Using School League Tables to Inform School Choice, CMPO Working Paper Series
No. 09/208, available at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2009/wp208.pdf
14
Gewirtz, S, Ball, SJ, and Bowe, R, (1995), Markets, Choice and Equity in Education, Buckingham: Open University Press.
15
Burgess, S, et al, 2006, School Choice in England: Background Facts, Centre for Market and Public Organisation Working Paper
No. 06/159, p11, available at: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/papers/2006/wp159.pdf 9 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
oversubscribed. In the event that a school is oversubscribed, proximity generally still determines
allocation, pushing up house prices around successful schools as better off parents attempt to secure a
place for their child. Recent reforms allowing academies to expand may help to overcome this ‘allocation
by postcode’ by increasing the number of spaces in oversubscribed schools.
4. Schools must find it beneficial to be popular and to grow
Recent reforms including the ‘Successful and Popular Schools Initiative’ and allowing academies to
unilaterally increase the number of pupils they take, have removed some of the financial and
administrative barriers to popular schools expanding. Whether or not they choose to expand however still
depends on their willingness to do so. In a conventional market the profit motive would incentivise popular
providers to expand their provision but state funded, for-profit schools remain illegal in the UK. Having said
that, head teacher’s pay is partly determined by school size and the leaders of some of the major academy
chains have seen their remuneration rise as their chains have expanded16, suggesting financial incentives
may already be in operation.
Overt financial incentives for expansion may not be necessary however, if successful schools are
motivated to increase their size in order to spread educational advantage. Many successful academies
have now opened up new schools in the same chain, presumably for these reasons. If one chain takes on
several schools within a specific locality however, this may in itself reduce competition.
The promotion of cooperative arrangements also raises serious questions about whether schools are
supposed to see themselves as trying to outperform other schools, in order to try and acquire larger
‘market share’, or whether they are supposed to work cooperatively to support each other’s performance.
Policy has consistently wavered on this. Between 1997 and 2002 there was a clear emphasis on the latter.
Between 2002 and 2007 a mixed strategy was employed, with policy aiming to spread and institutionalise
competition while also targeting cooperative interventions in specific urban areas. Since 2007 there has
been a marked return to a general emphasis on cooperation between schools through policies such as
National Leaders of Education and academy chains.
Teaching schools, of which the Department for Education intends to designate 500 by 2014, present
perhaps the most significant move away from a competitive schools policy because they will be explicitly
responsible for raising the quality of teaching across a collection of nearby schools.
5. The best way for schools to be popular must be to raise the quality of teaching and learning, rather
than engage in other activities
The introduction of the pupil premium reduces the opportunities for cream skimming by providing
additional resource to even out the additional cost of educating hard to teach children; though it is not
clear whether these have been removed entirely. The persistence of admission interviews in faith schools
and state funded grammar schools however, means that schools can still boost their popularity through
cream skimming, as opposed to increasing quality.
16
Shepherd, J, 2012, ‘Academies Pay 200K Salaries’, The Guardian, 14 November, available at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/nov/14/academies-pay-200k-salaries
10 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
Discussion
Tracing the history of quasi-market type reforms reveals several interesting features of the reform process.
The framework used throughout this paper emphasises the different components that all need to be in place to
make a system of school choice work. The piecemeal and gradual way in which quasi-market type reforms have
been introduced in the UK therefore requires explanation. One possible explanation is that the piecemeal reforms,
though they were perhaps intended to promote choice, were never intended to create a system-wide reform on the
scale of a quasi-market. Another explanation is that the reforms inadvertently supported the development of a
quasi-market. Specialist schools, for example, were intended to give schools their own distinct identity and ethos,
rather than to create variety and choice.17
Another noteworthy feature of the history is that many of the individual reforms have been of little consequence in
their own right. Some school choice advisers have expressed frustration that the most popular schools in their
area are consistently oversubscribed, meaning the parents they advise often have little real choice.18 This does not
mean that the choice adviser role has no value, but does show how particular elements of a quasi-market system
may be ineffective unless the other elements of the system are also in place.
This history also shows that the development of the quasi-market has at times been characterised by trial, error
and adaption. Open enrolment, for example, led to schools selecting pupils rather than pupils being able to select
schools and had to be reformed. Similarly, the metrics used to measure school performance on league tables have
also been changed and adapted several times in order to try and improve their usefulness to parents.
It also raises interesting questions about the compatibility of competitive and collaborative arrangements. In
general, reforms designed to promote collaboration are in tension with a competitive system. As one head teacher
put it “...as a teacher you want to improve all pupils... but perhaps not the ones in the school next door”.19 It is
important to point out however, that while competition and collaboration are clearly in tension with each other, they
are not necessarily inconsistent. If the member schools of academy chains are geographically dispersed, for
example, then they can cooperate among themselves while competing with nearby schools. In reality however,
academy chains generally say that to get the most benefit from association schools need to be in close proximity
to each other.20 National leaders of education also mostly work with schools that are close by, though not always.21
Even so, it may be possible for NLEs, who all come from high performing schools, to support struggling schools
while maintaining a competitive mind-set, if they do not perceive the struggling schools as a serious competitive
threat.
In summary, movement towards a quasi-market in secondary education has been gradual, uneven, piecemeal,
sometimes inadvertent and subject to trial, error and adaptation. Policy makers have wavered between promoting
competition and cooperation, sometimes moving further away from a quasi-market system. Michael Gove’s
emphasis on promoting cooperation has been particularly significant.
17
Adonis, A, Education, Education Education: Reforming England’s Schools, London: Biteback. Ch3. Exley, S, 2012, ‘Making Working-Class Parents Think More Like Middle-Class Parents: Choice Advisers in English Education’,
Journal of Education Policy
19
Quoted in Adnett, N, Davies, P, ‘Schooling Reform in England: from Quasi-Markets to Co-opetition?’, Journal of Education
Policy, 18:4, p399
20
O’Shaughnessy, J, 2012, Competition Meets Collaboration, Policy Exchange, P35, available at:
http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/competition%20meets%20collaboration.pdf
21
Hill, R, Matthews, P, Schools Leading Schools II: the Growing Impact of National Leaders of Education, p35, available at:
http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/2101/1/download%3Fid%3D117657%26filename%3Dschools-leading-schools-ii.pdf 18
11 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
Annex
There must be some way
Five
conditions
necessary for
a successful
system of
school choice
of creating new
approaches to educating
children, either through
allowing schools
autonomy over the drivers
Parents must value
Parental choice must
and be able to
be meaningful and
correctly identify
capable of affecting
educational success
the allocation of
as a school
pupils to schools
Schools must
find it
beneficial to be
popular and to
grow
characteristic
The best way for
schools to be
popular must be
to raise the
quality of
teaching and
of educational outcomes
learning
OR through imposition of
change from an outside
source
1980s
1980
Assisted places
Open enrolment
scheme.
Open enrolment
1986
City technology colleges
announced.
1988
School governing bodies
National curriculum and
80% funds
Grant-maintained
become responsible for
testing programme
allocated to
schools allowed
budgets and how they are
schools based
to apply to the
spent.
on pupil
secretary of state
Creation of grant-maintained
numbers
to select by
schools.
ability.
Local management of
schools.
1990s
1992
League tables and
Ofsted introduced
1993
Specialist schools
1995
Popular schools
initiative in
Wales, later
cancelled
1996
Encouraging new grammar
Schools given
schools
more power to
select pupils
1997
Education action
zones
1998
Assisted places
scheme abolished
Beacon schools
Admission
interviews
banned
1999
‘Fair funding’ increases the
financial autonomy of
schools
2000s
2002
Inclusion of ‘value
Inclusion of ‘value
added’ measures in
added’ measures
centrally published
in centrally
league tables
published league
tables
12 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
2003
London
Challenge
Leading Edge
Partnership
(expanded 2004)
2005
Local authorities obliged to
Inclusion of ‘contextual
Successful and
work with school
value added’ in
popular schools
commissioners to promote
centrally published
initiative
diversity and choice.
league tables
National Leaders
Trust schools.
of Education
(expanded 2008)
2006
Introduction of ‘choice
Expansion of free
advisors’ for poorer
school travel to cover
families
the three nearest
schools for poorer
children
2007
Standards and
development
fund
Expansion of the
number and size
of academy
chains
2010s
2010
Trust schools
Teaching
Massive increase in
schools
academies (to all schools
rated at least ‘good with
outstanding features’)
Free schools introduced
Specialist schools scrapped
2011
‘Contextual value
Value added
added’ replaced by
schools and
‘value added’
academies to
increase their
admission
number simply
by notifying the
local authority
2012
Vocational
Funding to follow
qualifications revalued
pupils more
in league tables
closely
Measures of value
added for pupil groups
published.
Pupil premium
13 The development of quasi-markets in secondary education
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